After my transfer to a new elementary school in the fourth grade, I was offered the opportunity to play a musical instrument. Music had always been a huge part of my life, whether in synagogue, which I attended each Shabbat morning with my grandfather,...

It’s been more than a year since I began reading the Torah through COVID-colored glasses. Or perhaps more aptly, I’ve been reading Torah this year through a mask. Familiar stories and concepts in the Torah read differently from home, on Zoom, streaming,...

When we enter the world of the Book of Numbers, Bamidbar, In the Wilderness, I harken back to the discomfort of my own camping experiences. There was always grumbling from me or my brother. Yet the wilderness is the place of revelation. True, its...

What are you looking forward to when you retire from the rabbinate? That’s the question we posed to several St. Louis area rabbis. Here’s what they told us: Rabbi Noah Arnow, Kol Rinah, age 41:  Although retirement feels rather distant...

In the mid ’90s, when Rabbi Jeffrey Stiffman served as chairman of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) ethics committee, the Reform Jewish group faced a quandary: What do you do when a retiring rabbi sticks around too long? “There...

In Denver, I was based in the community’s nominally Jewish hospital and spent half of my time there delivering pastoral care to a wide variety of people and families.One of the areas in which I was called to specialize came as a result a need identified...

This particular Passover observance, while it may be dominated by the external expressions inspired by time-bound practices, has presented us with an opportunity to recalculate our future by recalibrating our reason for being.Most of us, myself included,...

The “Sarajevo Haggadah,” handwritten and illustrated in 14th century Spain, was probably part of the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The details of how and when it arrived in Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are not known. But it...

Ever since Rabbi Menachem Greenblatt spearheaded efforts to start the St. Louis Kollel in 1991, he has served as dean — in a part-time capacity.Now, three decades later, Greenblatt is stepping down from the position to allow a rabbi to run the Orthodox...

Remember when we used to congregate together in our synagogues, at the Jewish Community Center, at restaurants, in movie theaters and in other such meeting places? Remember when people wearing masks were usually about to commit a crime rather than protect...

This week’s parshah, Kee Teesa, contains one of the ugliest transgressions in the long history of the Jewish people: Chet HaEgel, the sin of the forging and worshipping the Golden Calf.Quite honestly, if I had my druthers, and the chutzpah to do so,...

A recent article in The Atlantic (“The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship”) focuses on the decline of interactions among “weak social ties” during the COVID-19 pandemic. This refers to the people we know casually – the people...